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Lumpley Monster Creation

In a post over at the ForgeVincent Baker talks about some really cool sounding monster creation rules he’s working on. Now this is what D&D 4e should be like:

Along those lines, its biggest success (and what I want to tell you about) is just how frickin’ cool the monster creation rules are. Here’s how they work. There’s a list of things that monsters can be made of – glass, steel, flesh, wood, shadow, etc. Each one comes with some attacks you can choose from – like, for a monster made of bone, you can choose from club, impale, tear, frighten, and maybe a couple others. To create a monster, you roll or choose two things it’s made of and then choose three or four attacks from those two lists combined. (Then it gets dice and hit points, but that’s not the frickin’ cool part.) The combination of what it’s made of and how it attacks creates fun and compelling monsters with practically no effort.

I made a monster that’s a storm elemental in the form of a stag, a whirlwind with antlers and hooves of ice. Sebastian made a monster that’s a hive of undead bees, their exoskeletons, that swarm and tear into you. Elliot made a monster that’s a plain old army of undead (he rolled that it was made of flesh and bone, and for its attacks he chose strangle, club, frighten and overrun). Meg made a monster that’s a giant wooden spider that spins webs of razor-sharp glass, it spins them out at you and they bind and slice.